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“A Wasted Yom Kippur”

The High Holy Days are just over a month away. The time of the New Year and, ten days later, the time of repentance at Yom Kippur are almost upon us.

As a Jew by choice who will be officially a member of the Tribe only sixteen days before Rosh Hashanah (if I’ve counted correctly), and who had a powerful, meaningful experience at last year’s Yom Kippur, the High Holy Days will probably hit me hard every single year. Last year, part of what hit me so hard was that we aren’t getting singled out for our sin. We are all confessing, communally, as a community, to grave sins.

This is on my mind today partly because of an article in this morning’s New York Times. This article is talking about the recent murders of Shira Banki and Ali Saad Dawabsheh by Jewish extremist fanatics. I could quote from…

2 thoughts on ““A Wasted Yom Kippur””

It was the High Holy Days liturgy that got me, too. The injunction, specifically, that “for sins of one human being against another, the Day of Atonement does not atone until they have made peace with one another.” I’m doing this from memory, but I think that’s close to what’s in Days of Awe. One of the things that disgusts me the most is seeing people get caught doing something awful and then announcing that they’ve now found Jesus and God has forgiven them, and we’re all supposed to congratulate them and relax and forget all about it, because now everything is hunky-dory, without one syllable about doing anything direct to repair the damage they’ve done. I always thought that was a pretty nifty way of avoiding taking responsibility for cleaning up one’s own messes. I like our approach a lot better.